When brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor suffered from a stroke at the age of 37, she lost her memories, her ability to use language and her ego self. Because she couldn't remember who she was, watch as Dr. Taylor says she was blessed with the gift of an awakening.

On Oprah's Soul Series, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor gives Oprah a tutorial on the functions of the brain and how the brain is affected when a stroke occurs. But here's the thing, Dr. Taylor didn't just tell Oprah—she showed her with a real human brain!

Brain scientist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor woke up in the morning, hit the snooze button on her alarm and felt a tremendous, pulsing pain behind her left eye. Little did Dr. Taylor know she was experiencing a hemorrhagic stroke.

I grew up to study the brain because I have a brother who has been diagnosed with the brain disorder, schizophrenia. I wanted to understand why my brother experienced hallucinations and delusions and why I did not. What was different about the neurocircuitry in my brother's brain? My research specialty, in the Lab for Structural Neuroscience at the Harvard Medical School Department of Psychiatry, was the postmortem investigation of the brain as it related to the severe mental illnesses. At the same time, I served on the national board of directors of NAMI, the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

But as irony would have it, I woke up one morning to discover that I had a brain disorder. At the age of 37, a blood vessel exploded in the left half of my brain and over the course of four hours I watched my brain completely deteriorate in its ability to process all information. On the afternoon of the stroke, I could not walk, talk, read, write or recall any of my life. I became an infant in a woman's body. I didn't even know what a mother was, much less who my mother was.